DCTU Pre-Budget Protest - Saturday 24th November

The Dublin Council of Trade Unions is bringing together a broad coalition for this years pre-budget protest on Saturday 24th November, 1pm, Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

Among those mobilising are the SIPTU Community Campaign, Community Against Cuts, The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, The Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes and the SIPTU Dublin District Committee.

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Comments (15 of 15)

how about cutting public servants over 100K and their bloated pension plans?? (and politicians too)
How about cutting pay of top trade unionists??

It seems to me this is all just lip service. The government have a handy arrangement with PS unions as long as they stick with croke park and protect the well paid public service. (I'm talking those over 50k not the rest here) and since their pay is linked to these, they protect themselves too.

The recent report on TD pay was an eye opener.

The budget will again hammer those without a strong voice on social welfare and any community voluntary services.

Meanwhile Greedy TD's will keep their basic pay of 93k plus extras which can nearly double it up to 180k. All for having absolutely no effect on Dail decisions which are essentially just pushed through by the party whip.

And all that money and all those ineffective TDs just to manage a population comparable to that of greater manchester.

In a recession this is complete lunacy and a guarantee to bring us further into recession more quickly.

Absolutely agree with capping public service pay. Cap ALL public service and union salaries at 100,000 per year. And don't stop there. Go for the real problem. Go after the rich. Go after those who have been the prime cause of this crisis, yet who have, incredibly, managed to spin this economic disaster as a crisis of public spending.

These rich, the truly rich, who make even the top public servants and union officials look like beggars, are getting richer, even during this deepening recession. It is time to reverse this. It is time to end the passive acceptance of great wealth, influence and control alongside massive unemployment, hopelessness and poverty. It is time to bring the issue of the distribution of wealth where it belongs - under the democratic control of the people. Politics is about power. Money is power. If democracy is to mean anything, all power, including money power, must be democratically limited by the people.

Don’t continue to be turkeys voting for Christmas. Don’t buy the nonsense from the rich and their hangers-on about high incomes being necessary to attract “talent”, the lie that “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. We paid fortunes, and continue to pay fortunes, and we still got monkeys. Overpaid incompetents are continuing to cause crisis after crisis, while ordinary people’s lives are destroyed.

!00,000 euro (for example) per year should be more than enough for anyone. It should provide more than enough incentive to set up a business. It allows for the fact that some people work harder, or smarter, or more effectively than others. Thousands of successful co-operatives, large and small, the world over, use such a system. A maximum income was used in Japan after WWII. President Roosevelt in the US proposed such a system during WWII. A maximum income could be a temporary or a permanent measure. It could be modified/ revised/fine-tuned/ or repealed every five or ten years. The important thing is that ordinary people are finally given the freedom to vote on an issue of the most crucial importance to them and to society. Many democracies already have a minimum income. It is time to evolve further, towards real democracy, where the really important decisions are taken by the people, rather than by elitist political/bureaucratic cabals in cahoots with unelected business or financial sharks.

One can understand elites and their useful idiots frowning and shaking their heads and giving fifty reasons why it could never work, but for those on low or middle income to not even consider trying the idea is truly like turkeys continuing to vote for Christmas. As George Bush tried to say "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." But to be fooled continually, again and again, year after year, all your life, to continue sucking up to the rich and authority, to continue, out of cynicism or naivete or apathy or despair, to do nothing, even when possible alternatives are proposed, is sheer lunacy.

Freud thought that the obsession with money was rooted in inadequate potty-training, Likewise, the famous economist Keynes said that "The love of money as a possession as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease". Even a rich stooge like Winston Churchill could acknowledge that (the people) "will not tolerate the existing system by which wealth is acquired, shared and employed. . . . They will set their faces like flint against the money power, heir of all other powers and tyrannies overthrown, and its obvious injustices."

There must be figures somewhere perhaps with the CSO, Dept of Finance or Revenue with a breakdown of the number of people in the Civil Service by salary. If we could get hold of those figures then we could cut through some of the rubbish rants around this and focus in those that are earning the big money and figure out how much can be saved.

this is not a matter of saving huge amounts of money, it's a matter of fair play and everyone being treated fairly.

This is currently not the case. That's why highly paid people both in and out of the public service need to be seen to be taking pain proportionately to how the weakest in society are having to.

Taking 100 euro flat tax off a person earning 50k is equivalent to taking 0.2% of their earnings

wheras for a social welfare recipient making 186 a week, it's a full 1% of their earnings.

Every flat tax hits a welfare recipient proportionally 5 times harder than a person earning 50k
The situation is twice as bad when compared to someone on 100k.

Plus that 1% is a greater proportion of their earnings.

If I take away 1% of the earnings of someone on 50k they are left with 49,500

If I take away 1% of the earnings of someone on 9672 they are left with 9575

Its not the same thing qualitatively at all.

The fact is higher paid people are much more insulated against what is going on than the poor who have hardly any insulation and feel the effects immediately. And it's these poor people that are being targetted while some sectors remain protected.

Of course the problem is really bailing out banks for absolutely no apparent gain (they are not really loaning money into the economy) and paying off foreign gambling debts that are not ours to begin with.

But since remedying that has been put off the table despite us being "special", we have to share out the problem in a fairer manner. It's not happening.

We need to see fairness or there will be problems. It's not about huge savings, it's about fairness.

not into Jesuitical political analysis.
Communities against the cuts good leaflet. lets challenege people, encourage people to come onto the streets in peaceful. proud of our class. lets lift the APATHY and FRUSTRATION. together

The following may be of interest in the general debate on austerity....

In his recent Village article (November 2012), Constantin Gurdgiev ridicules the left for thinking that “the rich” are sitting on a pot of gold. While one can’t expect anything else from a servant of the rich, the 50 billion owned by Ireland’s richest 300 people looks pretty much like a pot of gold to me. It would pay for all the cuts demanded by the austerity fascists four times over. It would pay the annual household charge for the entire country 300 times over. However, this can-do hyper-capitalist immediately runs up the white flag at even the idea of trying to seriously tax the rich, citing capital flight – the very capital flight he, with breath-taking hypocrisy, through his company (St. Colombanus AG – specialists in hiding cash in secret Swiss bank accounts), enables. When it comes to the poor and the middle-class, however, Constantli Grudging grandly declares that “Ireland needs real austerity – deeper than the one being attempted today……. We should be aiming to cut current public expenditure by some 30% in 2012-2013”.

Constantli Curmudgiev may have been understandably traumatised by his Soviet Union experience, but there is no use throwing the democracy baby out with the Soviet state-capitalist bathwater. Prior to the Soviet Union, I’m sure the Tsar had loads of tame “economists” like Constantly Grumbling telling the population there was no point to all that democracy/socialism stuff, that even daring to suggest a redistribution of the Tsar’s wealth would lead to capital flight, act as a damper on inward investment by other royals and as a disincentive to entrepreneurial serf-owners, would upset the holy markets and mess up the metrics and optics horribly. And that the Tsar was not really all that rich anyway, and there were not all that many in the aristocracy earning above 100 squillion per year, and they were worth every rouble, and that many an unfortunate noble had to survive on estates of only a million or so hectares,. And that even if such redistribution succeeded, it would only lead to an average rise in income for the ordinary serf or peasant of 0.00001% or whatever (official OECD figures).

Even if the redistribution of this pot of gold wasn’t enough to make much difference, where do people get the idea, scoffed at by Constantli Grungi, of great riches being available for all? It’s a fiction perpetrated, surprise, surprise, by capitalism itself, a variation on the lottery scam, the idea that we can all, or most of us, get rich if we deserve it and work hard or smart enough. It’s a lie because, exactly as in a lottery, only a tiny proportion can win/get rich, and they can only do so with the absolute iron requirement that the vast majority of people DO NOT win/get rich, no matter how hard or smart they work, or how deserving they are. Buying the occasional lottery ticket is one thing. Basing an entire global economy on such a scam is insane.

The central point, maybe even the whole point, of redistributing wealth, or better still, of ensuring that vast inequalities of wealth and power do not arise in the first place, is to increase fairness, and to puncture the delusional bubble, cynically encouraged by capitalist propagandists, of riches for all. It is a simple question of modern, civilised values, of extending further the push of history towards greater democracy, equality and justice. Forty years after the Club of Rome’s warning, “Limits to Growth”, the anachronistic Gurdgiev is still wedded to the growth delusion, that you can bake a bigger cake so the poor will get bigger crumbs, as an excuse not to tax the rich. The solution to the environmental catastrophes that are upon us, and the survival of civilisation, depends upon our directly addressing the issues of wealth distribution, on our growing up, and most especially on the rich growing up, and asking how much money they really need, rather than continuing to behave like spoilt brats, endlessly demanding more, usually in a futile attempt to indirectly fill some emotional longing for love or warmth or companionship or belonging or good sex by stuffing themselves with food or toys or power or money. Civilisation, our environment, our planet, are being destroyed for nothing. Even establishment studies, with facts and figures and metrics galore, show that money, beyond a certain minimum requirement and parity with one’s peers, does not increase happiness. Freud thought the obsession of the rich with money was due to inadequate potty-training.

And from a practical point of view, in the long term a society will only really pull together if that society is perceived by its members as being fair. All this is something apparently lost on Constantin Gurrier, who argues instead for even less fairness, for less democracy, for making the poor pay more. He is part of a long line of tyrants and their mouthpieces down the ages, from business sharks to tsars to kings to emperors to pharaohs to the local warlord to slave-owners. Cantstandim Gurgling rehashes the old self-serving hypocrisy of the rich – that when you want the rich and powerful to work harder, you must reward and coddle them, you must help them hide their money, you must pay them more; but when you want the poor to work harder, you must threaten and abuse them, you must cut their paltry benefits, you must pay them less, or, preferably, nothing at all.

Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, speaking about the Irish Famine, said that “I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared that the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good”. Constantli Scourging, another ideologue of the “free” market, another of those economists who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, who would top Marie Antoinette and cheerfully suggest “Let them eat nothing” to the poor, would have had a field day during the Irish Famine. I prefer the attitude of another Russian, Tolstoy, who clearly saw the hypocrisy of even the charitable rich: “I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”

Let Constantin Gurdgiev call for reduced state spending. Let him help implement 30% cuts. Even if he succeeds, since state spending is a means of damping down social dissent, he is cutting his own throat and those of his masters. If he wants to be on the wrong side of history, fine, let him, but let’s not join him. All out on Saturday 24th November for the protest!

Time to Make our Voices Heard, Say Organisers of November 24th Anti-Austerity March

The groups organising the Anti-Austerity March on November 24th today (Monday, November 19th) held a joint press conference.

Chairing the press conference, Tommy McKearney, speaking on behalf of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, said:

“The CAH&WT is urging all campaign members and supporters to take part in the national pre-budget anti-austerity demonstration in Dublin on Saturday 24th November. With the OECD reporting Ireland’s unemployment rate as the fourth highest among developed countries and clear evidence of household incomes falling, December’s budget must not cause still more damage through further cut-backs. The CAH&WT message is straight-forward : The Coalition must be told loud and clear on 24th November that it was not elected to impoverish the people”, Mr McKearney said.

Speaking on behalf of the Communities Against Cuts campaign, Lynda Scully said:

“This year’s budget will cut €1.7 billion from public expenditure. If the last five budgets are anything to go by, this will be disproportionately targeted at the poorest and most disadvantaged communities, devastating the community sector by removing local services and jobs. If this is allowed to happen we will see closures throughout the country in youth services, child-care, elder care, training and education projects, local and community development and drugs projects. This march is for the people to stand up and let the government know the last five budgets have not worked, and nor will this one".

John Bissett of the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope said:

“On Saturday November 24th community groups from all over Dublin and beyond will be joining the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope to articulate their anger at the continuation of austerity measures which will be further exacerbated in the upcoming Budget”.

Michael O’Reilly of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions said:

“After five austerity budgets, 300,000 of our fellow citizens are unemployed and one million people are living in deprivation. Yet on December 5th the Government is set to introduce the sixth austerity budget since the onset of the crisis. That is why we are asking people to join us on November 24th and send a clear message to Government Buildings in advance of the Budget: We need to change direction and start focussing on growth and investment rather than destructive cuts”.

ENDS

For further information contact:

John Bissett (Spectacle of Defiance and Hope) 087-9889132

David Connolly (Communities Against Cuts) 087-9073573

Gregor Kerr (Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes) 086-1501151

Alex Klemm (DCTU) 087-2606139

The November 24th Anti-Austerity March will take place at 1 pm on Saturday, November 24th, starting from Parnell Square

Myself (and my three daughters) will be taking part in this protest : I'll be there with other RSF supporters and members and, like them, I don't want my participation to be misinterpreted as support for the Trade Union leadership.
More comment on that subject can be found at the 'Related Link' , below.
Thanks,
Sharon.

Like the other approximately 20,000 protestors , I braved the icy conditions and other inconviences to take part in this protest and was one of the thousands that loudly voiced our displeasure at the TU leadership for seeking to 'manage' these savage cutbacks rather than stop them - and , like those other protestors, I have been labeled a "fascist" for doing so.
Jack and his fellow pet-rebels should consider physically moving into Leinster House before the next protest is held, as it is obvious that they are are there already , mentally and morally.
More comment re same (and links to protest pics) at the 'Related Link' , below.